In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,23

garbage that hadn’t been consumed by the fire. The forlorn sight stands in stark contrast to my own fleeting memories of the hundred-year-old blue-and-white building with WAGLISLA (the Heiltsuk name for Bella Bella) emblazoned over the front entrance.

“It’s a huge tragedy,” Mary says of the fire as I arrive, greeting me with a long face. As we enter her office and sit down, she tells me she is working on the case to help the three girls accused of setting the blaze.

Mary is Bella Bella’s restorative justice coordinator. She’s an advocate for community members going through Canada’s criminal justice system while also acting as a representative of the tribal justice arm of the band, helping rehabilitate offenders in ways more in line with Heiltsuk culture. Mary is confident and self-assured, probably in her mid-forties, and has a bubbly personality. The nine teenage girls she accompanied to the cabin in Roscoe in 2008, she says, were at-risk youth, and the camping trip was part of her work.

“I haven’t told this story for a few years,” she begins somewhat nervously. “I sometimes can’t believe it happened—but it did. And I wasn’t the only person there.”

Traveling by boat, the group arrived at the bayside cabin during low tide in the late afternoon on the Friday of the weekend outing. After dropping crab traps at one end of the bay, Mary and the other adults took the girls to the cabin located at the other end. There they set up camp and showed the girls how to dig for clams on the beach. As dusk neared, Mary, the two other adults, and one of the girls got back into the boat to retrieve the crab traps. The tide was still low. The rocky, forested shore, maybe a hundred yards away at the most, rose a bit above their heads.

“As I was pulling up one of the traps I had this really eerie feeling something was watching us,” Mary says. “I began to look around. The others felt the same.”

As Mary pulled her trap out of the water, one of the adults, her friend Marilyn, screamed, “Look! Look!“ and pointed toward the shore.

“I looked up and couldn’t believe what I saw—there was a Thla’thla right at the tip of the rock!” she says. “Sorry, a what on the rock?”

“A Thla’thla. That’s the word in our language for a Sasquatch. It was crouched down with its arms hanging around its knees, which were up past its shoulders. It was brown in color and just huge. It looked just like that character in Star Trek.“

“You mean Chewbacca? In Star Wars?”

“That’s it. It was like a giant monkey with a human-shaped head. And it was watching us in what looked like amazement. It was leaning forward, just staring at us. And at first we were just in awe.”

Both the boaters and the creature were frozen in shock. But then the gravity of the situation sank in. Marilyn, who had first spotted the creature, started screaming in horror, yelling hysterically at her husband to start the motor so they could escape. That surge of fright startled the animal, and it stood up. At that moment the boaters saw the creature in its full dimensions: roughly eight feet in height, with long arms, broad shoulders, and a barrel chest.

“Its arms were so long, and its hands were so big,” Mary recalls. “It stood up and looked over its shoulder at us as it walked off. After three or four steps it was gone, into the forest.”

The relief at seeing the animal leave turned into renewed terror when the adults realized that the girls digging clams on the beach were now in danger. Mary paints a scene of utter pandemonium, as the boaters, in an effort to alert the girls, drove their vessel at full throttle onto the beach—with the impact nearly throwing them out. They then sprinted down the shoreline yelling to the girls at the top of their lungs to get into the cabin as quickly as possible, because they’d seen a Thla’thla. Seeing the adults in hysterics, and well versed in old stories about Sasquatches, the teenagers were whipped into paroxysms of fright. Everyone fled inside.

Safe and in the cabin, the group went over and over the details of the encounter in amazement and disbelief. Once everyone had calmed down, a few hours later, the group agreed that the creature was likely gone and wouldn’t return. As evening fell, the adults set about making dinner, while the girls